Gagging the press is dangerous to a government’s own health

‘The road to controlling the press, however attractive to rulers it may be, must be trodden with extreme wariness. For it is luxuriantly strewn with signposts that read: “Expect unintended consequences!”’, writes Cameron Duodu.

Court cases involving government members and their associates are reported in an unfavourable light, it is claimed. And often, secret information which embarrasses the government is leaked to the media. Some members of the government therefore do not see why they should put up with it any longer.

So the government was said to be considering passing legislation which would, in short, curtail the ability of the media to mess the government up. This, of course, alarmed the media and journalists mounted a spirited campaign to arouse public opinion to thwart the government’s designs.

It was not a new dilemma at all. In Britain, for instance, what became known as ‘the fourth estate of the realm’ was created after years of suffering by writers, pamphleteers and journalists, some of whom were jailed for sedition or criminal libel. They continued to fight, however, until freedom of the press was achieved as a principal component of what the political thinker, Tom Paine, called ‘The Rights of Man’.

To me, the South African debate over the media brought a weird feeling of déjà vu, for it mirrored, almost exactly, a similar contretemps that occurred in my country, Ghana, a few months after it achieved its independence in March 1957.

At that time, the biggest and slickest newspaper in the country was foreign-owned. It was the Daily Graphic, which was set up in 1950 by the Daily Mirror Group, based in London. Because of its origins, it was suspected of collaboration with the colonial administration by the leaders of our anti-colonial struggle, grouped around Dr Kwame Nkrumah, in the Convention People’s Party (CPP). So they began to hound the Graphic.

Nkrumah had his own papers – the Accra Evenings News and the Cape Coast Daily Mail. These sold like hot cakes, though they were produced on flatbed machines and looked amateurish. But the writing was tight and incisive and always had the same target: What in hell’s name were khaki-wearing white men in pith-helmets doing in our country? Under the masthead were three fiery words: ‘Self-government Now!’

An issue of the Cape Coast Daily Mail so incensed the colonial authorities in 1950 that they passed a sedition bill, and within two days, had used it to sentence Kwame Nkrumah to three years imprisonment. Can you imagine that? Three years for writing what was on his mind! And by the ‘Mother of Democracy’ at that!

Imprisonment only made Nkrumah more popular,  while it unmasked the British: many Ghanaians had bought the British propaganda line that they were leading Ghana by the hand towards self-government, but now they saw their leading  spokesman jailed for speaking the truth. And that realisation marked the beginning of the end of British rule in Ghana. Strikes, looting of foreign-owned shops, and subtle non-cooperation intensified, and in desperation, the British had to enact a new constitution for Ghana. They held a general election under it, in which universal adult suffrage was used for the first time.

Nkrumah was allowed to contest the election, and from his jail cell, he obtained the highest number of votes cast for anyone in the whole country. His CPP won a majority of the seats: Able lieutenants like Komla Gbedemah romanticised Nkrumah’s leadership by spreading rumours that he was sending them messages written on toilet paper, and smuggled out of prison! The CPP’s majority was so impressive that the British were forced to do a humiliating flip-flop and release Nkrumah from prison immediately. Not only that – they made him ‘leader of government business’ in the new legislature. They didn’t want to call him ‘prime minister’ as yet, but everyone knew that the strange, grandiose title meant he was ‘number one’ in the new government.

But alas, at home, Nkrumah had begun to dismantle the democracy of which he had become a symbol in the eyes of the world. When he proposed to put his effigy on new coins being minted for Ghana, a popular columnist of the Daily Graphic, Bankole Timothy, pilloried him in an article entitled, ‘What next, Kwame?’ Nkrumah would have written something worse in the colonial days. But he was not amused and deported Timothy forthwith to his home country, Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, Nkrumah had set up his own ‘Guinea Press’ to publish newspapers that were ostensibly to push his own agenda. But instead of doing that, these papers began to intimidate writers, both local and foreign, who criticised the Nkrumah regime. Then, towards the end of 1958, the atmosphere of free give-and-take between government and opposition nose-dived steeply. The Nkrumah government used its majority in parliament to pass a Preventive Detention Act (PDA) which empowered the government to detain, without trial for five years, ‘any person whose activities were not conducive to the public good’.

The provisions of the new law were so wide that all manner of people could be caught by it, especially those fingered by rivals acting as informants. There were reports that taxi drivers who criticised the government while carrying passengers they did not know, had been jailed under the law. The ranks of the official opposition MPs, whose contribution to debates had elucidated many issues of  the day, began to dwindle, as the most eloquent of them were carted off to Nsawam Prison, 22 miles from Accra.

It is very likely that these Nkrumah-party men were stitched up by political rivals, for they were all Gas (people who hailed from the capital, Accra). They were charged with treason, but the highest court in the land could not find any evidence upon which to convict them. So they were acquitted. But Nkrumah hit the roof, got parliament to empower him to nullify the judgement, and then ordered a retrial – after getting rid of the judges who had acquitted the accused persons. The accused persons  were, of course, convicted by the new court and sentenced to death. But Nkrumash at least had the good sense to commute  the sentences to life imprisonment.

There were, by now, no journalists left in Ghana  who were brave enough to protest against this outrage against the natural justice that was owed to these once-powerful men and “disciples” of Nkrumah himself. Of course, they received very little public sympathy, for they  had sat down and taken part in the demolition of the institutions that  should have  made all Ghanaians free. And now, they  too  were at the mercy of one man, with no media left that was  able to give them a chance to state  their side of an issue that had sent them to death row itself.

From then on, such was the dearth of political discourse that any propaganda crafted against Nkrumah was eagerly believed. So, his own position also began to crumble, and when a group of soldiers and policemen decided to conspire against him and overthrow his regime, they were easily  able to recruit others to join their conspiracy. Thus it was that on 24 February 1966, while Nkrumah was in Peking, en route to Hanoi, where he was going to try and mediate in the Vietnam war, he was overthrown in a military coup. He died in exile in 1972.

Now, the question is: What if? My considered opinion is that if Ghana’s political situation had been frozen at say, mid-1958, when the opposition had not yet been driven underground, and everyone could have his say, and when the media could fearlessly bring out what was going wrong with the ship of state, we would have had a much cleaner and more efficient government, which would have been much more difficult to malign, and which would thus have been more difficult to overthrow.

Instead, Ghana descended from the initial totalitarian rule into cycles of military and civilian rule, during which it was fully demonstrated that once the precedent of wrecking freedom of the press had been established by the Nkrumah regime, succeeding governments that had attacked that regime for abusing press freedom would, themselves, also — quite hypocritically — attack that freedom, without batting an eyelid.

One example occurred in 1967, only a year after Nkrumah had been overthrown. Three top editors of the publicly-owned media were dismissed by the military National Liberation Council (NLC) government for criticising an agreement the government had signed with an American company, which virtually handed a Ghanaian pharmaceutical company to the American company  as a gift. When the military government was criticised for sacking the editors, its chairman and head of state, General Joseph Ankrah, retorted that ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’! What he was too uninformed to realise was that it was not the Government that owned the newspapers but the state — which comprised all citizens and  not only members of the government.

By the late 1980s, press freedom in Ghana had become a distant memory, as journalists were hounded left and right. One regime, for instance (led by Flight-Lieutenant J J Rawlings) had its agents ‘shit-bomb’ the offices of an opposition newspaper – an unheard-of abomination that is difficult merely to report and which introduced a new term into the Ghanaian political lexicography that, alas, is so gross that it  cannot be cleansed with any euphemism.

Under the same Rawlings regime, two journalists lost their lives after they had been imprisoned. They were Tommy Thompson and John Kugblenu, publisher and editor, respectively, of the weekly Free Press newspaper. They died shortly after being released from prison, their health having been fatally impaired by the terrible conditions they had endured whilst in prison.  Their fate drove quite a few  journalists  into exile.  Of those who remainedd, two  were sent to prison after being charged with an antiquated law from the colonial era – criminal libel —  for offending Mrs J J Rawlings. That case showed how other institutions of the state can be corrupted when press freedom is vitiated: the journalists were merely fined in the end, but in the mean time, the magistrate who tried them, eager to please the regime, had placed them in custody for several weeks, pending their sentencing. He thus used the discretionary power of refusing them bail, to ensure that the regime’s desire to punish the journalists was fully realised.

So, the road to controlling the press, however attractive to rulers it may be, must be trodden with extreme wariness. For it is luxuriantly strewn with signposts that read: ‘Expect unintended consequences!’

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

By Cameron Duodu

Cameron Duodu is a journalist, writer and commentator.
Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.